A partial explanation for this is that Apple A* cores by volume overwhelmingly go into extremely battery constrained devices whereas for Intel its a plurality o

A partial explanation for this is that Apple A* cores by volume overwhelmingly go into extremely battery constrained devices whereas for Intel its a plurality of their volume at most (and even then laptop use cases are less battery constrained than phones or tablets). Further, until very recently Intel had no reason to optimize for laptops because AMD was a non-factor and ARM based machines were only barely a thing. Core design is astronomically expensive so given the opportunity to build only one core (or two in the case of big.little) it seems reasonable that Apple's perf/W would be superior since they have had a very pressing business need for it. Add on that they have so far been built on one to two nodes ahead. The point being, I think if Intel still can't get close to Apple in 2-3 years then there is a bigger problem, but as of now I think there are still some reasonable explanations as to why their current products are behind that don't come down to technical inability.